Ongoing upgrades on the road to HiLumi
Upgrading the CMS muon chamber electronics
Work on the CMS muon system upgrade is now underway, with teams starting to install the new electronic system for the Drift Tube (DT) chambers. By 2028, all the 250 muon chambers in the CMS barrel will be equipped with the new mini crates housing the electronic boards to read out and control the DT chambers
These boards digitise signals from muons passing through the DT with nanosecond-level precision and transmit the information via high-speed optical links to the backend electronics. The new architecture will contribute to improve the performance of the CMS trigger system for the High-Luminosity LHC era, which selects interesting collisions among the billions that occur every second at the heart of the detector.
Without even waiting for collisions to return, the first DT chamber equipped with the new electronics has already recorded first real signals from muons produced by cosmic rays, particles that strike Earth’s atmosphere and generate showers of secondary particles. These represent the first real measurements from the future CMS DT system.